Liudmila Gorkun-Voevoda is a Revenue Management (RM) Data Scientist at the Lufthansa Group and is based at Swiss Airlines’ headquarters in Zurich. She is also a PhD Candidate in Economics and Econometrics at the Universität St. Gallen.
Liudmila’s interest in aviation started at an early age when she visited her grandparents during school holidays and would gaze at the airplanes passing by their house on the approach to the runway. She remembers fondly “looking at the planes and their tails and trying to identify which airlines they were.” Her interest in aviation grew throughout the years as she watched aviation-related documentaries and TV shows. She started looking for jobs with the Lufthansa Group and found a position that combined economics, her field of study, with data science, the field she wants to work in. “It’s super fulfilling that I have a job in which I actually enjoy what I do.”
“I am very happy, and the main thing that I like is that it is never boring because there is always so many different things coming up.” Liudmila likes RM because it is a broad field with many different questions that nobody has examined in detail yet.
Her day-to-day is busy with several projects in which she has to estimate the impact of different interventions on revenue and determine how to optimize revenue based on current regulations. She needs to work with substantial amounts of data, “experiment with it, see what we can get out of it, determine what the commercial use is, and if we can build any models that work from the data.”
For students interested in RM, Liudmila advises that RM is a broad field that encompasses a lot of skills depending on what one wants to do. When Liudmila was looking for jobs, she would look for positions she knew she would like to do, see what skill sets they were looking for, and try to tailor her education in that direction. She feels that having an economic background could be a keyway to differentiate yourself and prepare yourself for a career in RM. “The combination of quantitative plus economics skills I think is super useful in this job.”
Interested in learning more about Liudmila? Check out her LinkedIn page. But one fact you will not see about Liudmila online is that she loves to ski and collect ski passes! “Switzerland is an amazing place to be a skier.”